Where The Water Tastes Like Wine flows out February 28

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There are two things you should know about Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, the interactive fiction-ish anthology from Dim Bulb and Serenity Forge. One is that yer actual Sting is in it, supplying his dulcet tones to a hungry-looking wolfman who will narrate parts of the Americana odyssey. The second is that half of games journalism has written for it, including RPS escapees Cara Ellison and Leigh Alexander. Personally, Emily Short and Southern Monsters’ Kevin Snow are the names that make me particularly intrigued to play this. There’s a new trailer, seemingly narrated by Sting himself, which reveals WTWTLW’s release date – and, huh, it’s a lot sooner than I was expecting.

February 28th isn’t even two weeks away, but that’s when we’ll be able to glug down this promising story-driven adventure. It’ll set you back $20, and there’ll be a special edition that lobs in the soundtrack and a digital art book as well. I’m sure it will be on other stores in due course, but for now here’s the Steam page, complete with (modest) system requirements and a few other titbits.

I haven’t followed Where The Water too closely, but I’m perusing the website now and it seems very much like my sort of thing. The trailers aren’t terribly informative about how it plays, but I gather that the game mixes 3D exploration with illustrated elements, meaning that you’ll traverse a folkloric take on the United States via a three-dimensional map, before triggering stories that combine text with lovely artwork. An inventory screenshot makes mention of there being 219 stories to gather, which seems like a huge amount.

5 Comments

I played an unfinished version of this late last year for the IGF and absolutely loved it. There were quite a few chunks missing so looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in a few weeks. It’s really good.

It occurs to me that having half of games journalism write for it is a good way to ensure games journalism takes a charitable view of the result haha. Though I’m not so cynical as to imagine that’s been on purpose… at least not wholly so.

This one is an odd one, I’m looking forward to trying it out. I’m sort of perpetually torn between an interest in this sort of ethos/aesthetic and an exhaustion with it every time it seems inauthentic. Putting Sting in there is like a calculated move to maintain and even heighten that ambivalence. I’m pretty sure literally any sort of mention of Sting these days, in any context, will elicit the reaction from me: “…Sting??”

Also, it’ll be fun to see RPS react to it, in the same way it’s fun to see them react to American Truck Simulator, haha.

I’ve been playing this the last few days and I think I hate it. I can’t even get a feel for the overall quality for the writing because the game is just so awkward and clunky. The controls and UI just don’t feel up to scratch and the map where you spend most of your time feels like something out of a one day game jam.

I was really pleased with the concept and that the game was more ambitious in scope than a visual novel but they really didn’t pull it off as far as I’m concerned. I want to stick with it just so I have a better idea of what they’re trying to achieve because so far I’m getting nothing out of it. So far my play experience has just been a bunch of disconnected stories and and a strange dating simulator style game where I’m trying to give people stories they like. Oh and walking really slowly around a very uninteresting map (you can hitchhike and whistle though!).